Health and safety is a basic piece of your business and implementing it well protects individuals as well as your business from lawsuits. Nobody wants to see an employee hurt at work and, after that, face seeing their business deal with the repercussions of legal action. It’s critical to not see health and safety as a bothersome side task that you have to comply with, but rather as a way for you to do your best for employees so they do their best for you. After all, the safer and more relaxed a workplace is, the better it will run.
Your Legal Friend has helped us pull this together this article, where we will cover off a couple of obvious, and a couple of less obvious, facts about work accident claims and what you should be doing as a business owner.
You have an inescapable duty of care
It may be a very obvious fact but you have a real obligation to guarantee you are doing everything you can to safeguard people in your business as they carry out their daily tasks. It’s so obvious that you may wonder how anyone would fail at doing so, but it’s often the situations you least expect that lead to problems.
Imagine a scenario where you asked one of your workers to move some boxes of paper and they hurt their back doing so. Would you be liable for that injury despite the fact that they appeared physically capable or do a manual job every day? The answer is ‘yes’, if they’ve never had any manual handling training, and ‘no’ if they have. Like we said, it’s very easy to accidentally cross the line through situations you’d least expect.
You must be insured by law
You need to buy insurance for your business and it’s a legal obligation that you do so. The part we’re focusing on here is that which covers worker’s compensation and accident liability. This insurance work’s for business and employee should something happen – it will help provide the compensation money for the injured party and will help cover legal fees and some compensation owed to them by your business.
Beyond that, if you don’t have insurance, a lot of lawyers won’t take the case which you might think would be ideal, but you’d still end up facing legal action from local authorities, and depending on the severity of the accident, even jail time.
Training and protective equipment is really important
Health and safety, as you’ll know, is divided into two essential parts; training and PPE (personal protective equipment). Most businesses manage to provide both but many often fail to train workers how to use the PE properly. For instance, telling your workers that they need to wear ear protection around loud machinery is great, however, what you need to do in addition to this is give training on precisely why it must be worn, how to wear it properly, how to spot when it’s broken, how regularly it ought to be replaced and where to get that replacement. Neglecting to make clear to your workforce the correct use of PPE could mean a claim headed in your direction.
It’s also essential to ensure employees comprehend their training and that they agree to use it; this often requires them completing a short survey and keeping a record of when training was received, tests passed and agreements to follow procedure made. What’s more, this leads on to our next fact…
Employees can be responsible for their own injury
Quite often, accidents in the workplace are at least partially down to the employee not following protocol, but often this is not revealed until a full investigation has been carried out. It’s best to always go into investigating accidents as neutrally as possible, even if you feel certain someone in particular was to blame. You instinct could be to believe you have let something slip which could be damaging to your business should the employee find that out, when in reality, you followed all safety standards you should have.
When carrying out your investigation, always start with those training records, tests and signoffs by the employee; they will give you a clear picture of what they were trained to do versus what they actually did. For example, an accident may occur where somebody trips over wiring by their work area and breaks their arm. Your investigation uncovers that they moved a bit of PC equipment, causing the lose wiring, and knew about the wires being a hazard yet did not report it to the health and safety officer as they had been trained to three months earlier. In this situation, the worker is responsible for their own accident. Furthermore, this segues on pleasantly to the following truth…
You can both be partly responsible for the accident
As mentioned above, a lot of work accidents actually do see the injured worker as partly responsible for the incident. What this usually means is that the percentage of responsibility they are deigned to have is removed for the total compensation amount offered.
Let’s use the example of the worker moving computer equipment again. When the employee joined the company a year ago, they were trained in correct health and safety procedure but since then the health and safety officer has changed, so they don’t know who to report hazards to. You’d be responsible for not keeping training up to date so procedure can be followed, but they would be responsible for not following training in the first place –thus you are both responsible for the incident.
